Blizzard is asking for feedback on class balance and answering theorycrafting questions. This article continues our coverage of hunter-related discussions in the thread. You’ll find all of the official posts regarding hunters in MoP in the WHH MoP Hunter Guide.
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Otsego: Recently GC posted about how Devs can’t be too open to public opinion. His reasoning basically boils down to (paraphrasing here) “no one wants to get nerfed, but we need to nerf occasionally.” Yet that misses the point of many players complaints and doesn’t address the big picture.
Let’s say you go to a restaurant for a Cheese burger, and let’s say you hate mayonnaise (I do). So you look at the menu and read what comes on the cheese burger, and there is no mention of nasty mayo. So you order it and when it comes out BAM a big ol nasty glob of mayo on your burger. So you say “Hey when I ordered this there was no mention of mayo on the menu.” Then your waiter says “Oh, well we decided its better this way.” You say “Ok I’m glad you think so, but I don’t like mayo. Can I have the burger I ordered instead?” To which the waiter replies “No, see you’ll like it better with mayo.” To which you reply “I think I know what I like better than you do.” Then the waiter “Well we still believe it’s better with mayo so that’s how its going to stay.” Then you ask “Do you want me to be a customer?”
The point is balancing dps output / healing is all fine and dandy but changing the way a class plays isn’t necessary to do so. Nerfing the dps output of skill A from class A while buffing spell B from class B is also a viable solution. Some would say that can’t always solve the issue of balance as some classes may burst dps better than others. Its seems Blizzard’s approach to solve this would be to bog the class down w/ more skills, spreading the dps out. When a much easier answer would be to lower one existing spell and raise another.
But if balancing is the true concern then why is there such a difference in the complexity and length (length being most important) of the classes’ rotation/priority list? I have mained a hunter since I started playing, but have also grinded up a mage, boomkin, s.priest, and prot pally. Three of these classes will have half or less than half the priority list of my hunter when they reach lvl 90. That is not balanced.
YES YES I KNOW other classes such as DK are plagued with over-complexity and I feel your pain.
But I don’t believe the changes are always intended for balance. Let’s think about it, after a decade of this game they haven’t got it right? They feel classes need tweeking? No they believe that changes to the characters offers more depth into the game. It doesn’t. When it all boils down to it we come to fight the bosses (or players) and everything else is just mashing buttons. Game depth doesn’t come from learning how to play, it comes from playing. Memorizing 25 keybinds is nowhere near as fun as coordinating attacks with a group, in order to defeat a ten story tall monster.
Lastly why it is unfair for Devs to change my class drastically. Because 3 years ago I made this character based on how it was then. If someone would have told me that Blizzard will add FIVE new CDs to the character in two expansions, rendering it a game of whackamole, well I would have probably rolled a different class. And YES I still can, but all the time and effort spent on this character will be lost and that isn’t right.
But if you still say you know best and the players can’t decide what’s more enjoyable to them, Then why OH WHY did you just FINALLY decide to get rid of minimum range. Truth is (at least on that one) the players know best.
Here’s a great way to look at this. I ordered my Cheeseburger (made a hunter) a while back, and now Blizzard just slapped some mayo on it, and I don’t like mayo, and you’re not going to convince me it’s better with mayo. [link]
Ghostcrawler: You have to consider that WoW is a multiplayer game in which players are very often competing, whether comparing damage meters in a raid or out and out trying to kill each other in PvP. Changes to your character end up affecting everyone who comes into contact with your character. If you can order up exactly what you want, you’re affecting a bunch of other people.
In your hamburger analogy, you’re telling the restaurant “You should make sure that nobody can have mayonnaise because I don’t like it.”
I’ve actually used the restaurant analogy myself, because few restaurant patrons have the impression that they’re going to be able to go back into the kitchen, give the chefs pointers, rearrange the menu and so on just because they think highly of their own opinions on food. Restaurants may honor your request to hold the salt or put the dressing on the side, and many chefs are probably thrilled to get feedback on the dishes they prepare to get an idea of what their customers like or not, but ultimately if you don’t like a restaurant’s food, you should probably go to another restaurant, not try and change the menu.
As far as class complexity, that’s another attempt to serve a very diverse player base. Some players like a few buttons and some like to have a lot. If the restaurant required every dish to have the same number of ingredients, that doesn’t improve the quality of the food. I only think it’s a problem if some classes are so much more challenging to play that those players expect to do higher DPS as a result, or I guess if the number of buttons is truly stupid.
Also, remember that there is a huge difference between reasonable and optional. If adding an ability to your rotation improves your DPS by 1% then it might not be worth worrying about. I actually wish guides would focus a little more on describing both the “90% rotation” as well as the “theoretically highest rotation.” [link]
And i did respond. We will see if he can again. Doubtful.
Ghostcrawler did comment again in your thread. See The Cheeseburger Dilemma: Follow-up
yes i did see and im impressed.
GC sounds like a politician with that response. He talks a lot but he doesn’t say anything. The only meaningful thing is the last statement. It’s something that I was planning to investigate anyway. What happens if I don’t use Ability X in my rotation?
I tested using femaledwarf, BM lvl 90 with 496 gear (hit and exp capped) no buff/debuffs, and removed one ability from the rotation at a time. The results were interesting to say the least.
Ability – DPS – DPS loss (%)
All abilities – 61602.76 – 0.00%
Cobra Shot – FD crashed…
Arcane Shot – 56989.95 – 7.49%
Kill Command – 57749.84 – 6.25%
Dire Beast – 58003.17 – 5.84%
Lynx Rush – 58796.08 – 4.56%
Bestial Wrath – 59284.06 – 3.76%
Readiness – 59976.68 – 2.64%
Glaive Toss – 60093.76 – 2.45%
Focus Fire – 60113.03 – 2.42%
Serpent Sting – 60215.59 – 2.25%
Rapid Fire – 60412.26 – 1.93%
Stampede – 60734.85 – 1.41%
Kill Shot – 60767.13 – 1.36%
Kill Shot and Stampede are pretty pathetic. Rapid Fire, Serpent Sting, and Focus Fire while standard abilities that we used before aren’t very powerful. Glaive Toss is rather lame for a lvl 90 talent. Readiness, while a cool addition to our toolset, does not have a huge impact on our dps. Dire Beast and Lynx Rush are worth more than Bestial Wrath, which just seems wrong. Cobra Shot, Arcane Shot, and Kill Command are at least still our top priorities.
So let’s see if we can figure out what our 90% priority list might look like.
Let’s start by dropping all the new abilities: Dire Beast, Lynx Rush, Readiness, Glaive Toss, and Stampede. The Back-to-basics rotation.
54793.08 11.05%
Pretty close to 90%. Let’s add Stampede back since it’s cool and it’s not hard to deal with since it’s such a long CD.
55740.32 9.52%
So there we go. The Back-To-Basics + Stampede 90% rotation. Don’t use any of the new Talents or Readiness.
Or how about the MoP rotation. Keep the new abilities but throw out the old poor performers: Kill Shot, Rapid Fire, Serpent Sting, Focus Fire.
56000.89 9.09%
Actually a little high. Dropping Stampede takes us a little too low though.
55034.76 10.66%
There are of course several other ways to get to 90% by swapping out different abilities.
It would be very interesting to test this out in practice. If a human can do 85% of the max simulated DPS in a stand still tank & spank, they’re doing really good and it’s even harder in real raiding scenarios. A human may actually do better dps by simplifying their rotation instead of trying to pack in everything and get closer to the theoretical max for that rotation. Doing 90% of the 90% is the same as doing 81% of the 100%.
So if you’re having difficulty with the new game of whack-a-mole (I know I am), consider leaving something out and seeing if the simpler rotation gives you the same or better performance. You might be surprised at the results. And if you really get that nailed down, you can try adding things back in.
P.S. I played with a couple other things just for fun.
The Cobra Shot rotation: 30077.18 51.18%
The CS+AS rotation: 39597.64 35.72%
The CS+AS+KC rotation: 42690.93 30.70%
P.P.S. HUGE THANKS to Zeherah for all her hard work in creating femaledwarf.com and making all this possible.
thanks for doing the work. would you mind adding what combat length you chose? this has a quite big impact on spells with long CDs.
I just used the default 5 minute fight.
Nice work Jaeger. For SV, Zeherah recently ran several sims and found that “the simc which uses dire beast + explosive shot on cooldown and the version which uses thrill and explosive shot only when LnL procs are virtually identical in damage. This does not hold true in level 90 sims but in level 85 sims with the 2pc T13 bonus it seems to make very little difference.”
I agree with Tabana. It doesn’t feel “right” anymore. In the past I used to smile when people got mad at poor Ghostcrawler. I thought “Come on, be open minded, give it a chance, they know what they do and you probably will like it!”. Actually this was true for many things, e.g. the change of our resource. Focus is so much better. To be honest, nowadays, reading GC stating they found a way to make playstyle or whatever “more interesting” — he scares the shit out of me. They might have found a way to mess it up. Actually, and unfortunately, this time they did. While some things still go into the right direction it feels like they had do add “interesting” stuff no matter what, just for the sake of it. Does ANY of the lead developers actually PLAY a hunter? (say, as a main character) HONESTLY?
Just to be clear, the forum post was written by Otsego. My preference would have been to hold the onions.
Addendum: Just two more cents… “Ulduar” vs. “8 seconds cooldown on dispelling”. Which one of those two would YOU choose? Regarding having more fun with your class, more complexity, “difficulty”, amazement, a good time —
I didn’t read all of the class feedback for hunters, when they asked for it many many months ago. But what i did read seemed to have very distinct common themes.
1) minimum range needs to go
2) pvp focus regen is terrible
3) some of the spec rotations / priorities are dull. Make them more interesting.
whilst you may agree with all those points, they were points raised by a lot of hunters, and therefore could be considered legitimate concerns. And we’ve gotten all of them, and more resolved.
Sadly, we still can’t tame druids.
Personally I find idle threats of leaving the game because you have a couple of additional buttons to press kind of childish – it’s a tactic used by the emo QQ’ers on the official forums too much. Ultimately an expansion reset – whereby all mechanics can be looked at and tweaked. between wrath and cata I rememver distinctly hating the changes, primarily because “how dare they change my class!”, but it worked out okay.
for me a preliminary 5.0.4 raid in BM , compared to 4.3 definitely feels different, and once again feels fresh and entertaining. Let’s be fair, the standard BM rotation was pretty dull beforehand. :)
of course complaining isn’t the right method of communicating issues with a class.
and yes you’re right, hunters had ups and downs over the last few addons but the quality of playstyle increased in general and now we’re in a pretty sweet spot, at least on 85. i’m not sure whether hunting has ever been as fun as now.
however, if there are issues they need to be addressed. for example, if the sim predictions are true, then neglecting big cooldowns results in almost no dps loss. of course there’s more to consider, but, ie, RF is difficult to fit in the rotation for BM nowdays so maybe it’s better to just forget it or cast it during BW and focus on other stuff. most of the time we’re flooded with so much focus that RF won’t do much more than give a little haste.
even moreso, the fact that SV hunters have the option to almost completely neglect their signature shot, is an indication that hunter could be changed into something even better.
imho, it is important that such well researched stuff is being posted in the official forums. i just hope that the blues will stop replying to those providing useless “feedback” and focus on the good posts instead.
I agree. We’ve been given a bigger toolset, and that equals more choice about play style. I’ve never seen choice as a bad thing, even if that means we choose not to click some of the new shiny buttons we have. Subsequently, I’d never threaten the game’s developers with stopping my subscription because I have too many shiny buttons to press.
The point is, I’d probably be more troubled if we hit a new expansion and we didn’t have unanswered questions.. if we didn’t have new things to find out about our beloved classes. That would be boring.